Sunday, November 1, 2015

El-Rufai’s Kufena Hills and Metaphors of Death in Nigerian Public Discourse

Everyday public discourse in Nigeria is disturbingly
suffused with casual references to death and of appeals to violence against (political) opponents. That’s why turns of phrase like “if you don’t like it, go
and hug a transformer,” “we will stone him if he doesn’t perform,” etc. are
recurrent in the quotidian expressive repertoire of many Nigerians.

The “transformer” has become the preferred demotic metaphor
for death, and “stone” has become the trope of choice to express fury toward
political opponents. They are often invoked when discussions get heated and
uncomfortable, or when interlocutors have exhausted their persuasive and
argumentative armory.

The thanatological and sanguinary character of the quotidian
conversational engagements of many Nigerians is emblematic, I think, of the
ingrained culture of morbid intolerance of dissent that was birthed and
nourished in the country by years of asphyxiating military totalitarianism. (Thanatos
is the ancient Greek god of death, so “thanatological” is an adjective for
anything concerned with death.) This culture of morbid abhorrence for dissent
is so widespread and so deep-seated that even elected public officials, who are
expected to be able to rein in their base emotions at least in public, are
often unable to rise superior to its temptation, especially in moments of
partisan political hyperarousal.

On October 16, 2015, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai joined
a long list of public officials who invoked bloodcurdling thanatological allusions
to shut down criticism. “All of us in Kaduna State Government have sworn with
the Qu'ran—Christians with the Holy Bible—to do justice and we will do justice,”
he said in Hausa during a town hall meeting in Kaduna. “We better stand and
tell ourselves the truth. Everyone knows the truth. No matter the noise, the
truth is one. And as I stand here, no matter who you are, I will face you and
tell you the truth. If you don’t want to hear the truth, you can climb Kufena
Hills and fall.”

Falling from Kufena Hills is a chilling local metaphor for
death. No one falls from a tall, steep hill and survives. That was why Sunday Vanguard of October 17, 2015
interpreted el-Rufai as asking his critics to “go
and die.” Although Governor el-Rufai didn’t directly utter the word “die,” Vanguard’s interpretive extension of his
thanatological metaphor is perfectly legitimate, even brilliant. It’s
interpretive journalism at its finest. It helped situate and contextualize the
governor’s utterance for people who don’t have the cultural and geographic
competence to grasp it.

Since anyone who jumps from the edge of a hill will
naturally plunge to his death, it’s impossible to defend the governor’s choice
of words with the resources of linguistic logic. Plus, text derives meaning
from context. The video clip of
the town hall meeting where el-Rufai enjoined his critics to go climb Kefena
Hills and fall shows him in a combative and livid mood. He wasn’t joking.
That’s why I think it is singularly disingenuous for el-Rufai’s media team to
insist that their principal didn’t ask his critics to go die.

El-Rufai’s
intolerance of criticism is particularly noteworthy because he is famous for
describing himself as a “certified ruffler of feathers,” and his political rise
owes a lot to his trenchant criticism of political opponents from the late
President Umar Musa Yar’adua to former President Goodluck Jonathan. That’s
probably why he thinks “the truth is one” and only he is its custodian. All
else is “noise,” and whoever can’t stand the one and only truth that only he
embodies is worthy only of violent death. This takes arrogant discursive
intolerance and rhetorical violence to a whole new level.

Kufena Hills, Zaria

Of course, rhetorical violence against political opponents
didn’t start with el-Rufai. Recall that in late 2014, former Katsina State
governor Ibrahim Shema used an even more insidious thanatological metaphor to
incite his supporters to mass slaughter. “You should not be bothered with
cockroaches of politics,” he said to his supporters in Hausa in
a leaked video. “Cockroaches are only found in the toilet even at homes. If
you see a cockroach in your house what do you do?”

Like el-Rufai’s paid spin doctors are doing, Shema could
have said he didn’t ask that anybody be murdered. After all, he didn’t directly
utter the word “kill,” or “murder,” although his animated supporters actually
said “kill” in response to his rhetorical question. But even an elementary
student of language knows that both the text and context of Shema’s utterance
point to a call to mass murder of political opponents.

Edo State governor Adams Oshiomhole dispensed with the
encumbering subtleties of metaphors and rhetorical sophistication in his own
thanatological aversion to irritation from the people who voted him to power. In
November 2013, when a widow who flouted state law by hawking on the street
begged him for mercy, he flew into a murderously tempestuous rage and yelled, “You
are a widow, go and die!” There were no metaphorical accoutrements to this
own thanatological missile; it was pure, unembellished, deathly candor that
left no room for any defensive rhetorical maneuvers by his spin doctors. That
was why he felt compelled to invite the distraught widow
to Edo State Government House, publicly apologize to her, and mollify her with
a 2 million naira monetary gift.

Oba of Lagos Rilwan Akiolu was even less refined than
Oshiomhole in his thanatological fury against political opponents. “On Saturday, if anyone of you, I swear in the
name of God, goes against my wish that [APC candidate] Ambode will be the next
governor of Lagos state, the person is going to die inside this water,” he told
Igbo leaders in Lagos who paid him a
courtesy visit in his palace. “If you [the crowd] do what I want, then Lagos will
continue to be prosperous for you. If you go against this, you will be banished
to the water! Finished!”

When politicians don’t invoke sepulchral metaphors and
references against political opponents, they casually endorse or make appeals
to barbarous violence using the trope of the stone. Appeals to stoning of
public officials are legion both by private citizens and by politicians, but
former president Goodluck Jonathan’s 2012 endorsement of stoning stands out
like a sore thumb.

On February 2, 2012,
Jonathan, while justifying the withdrawal of his support for the reelection of
former Governor Timipre Sylva, said the following to his favored candidate,
Seriake Dickson: “You have brought people from Abuja to Yenagoa today. The only
thing I want to tell you in the presence of Bayelsa State is that I was here in
this place some months ago and Bayelsans stoned [Governor Timipre Sylva]. You
must work hard to make sure that Bayelsans don't stone you. The day I come here
and Bayelsans stone you, I will follow and stone you.”

This presidential verbal indiscretion sparked justifiable
outrage. But Reuben Abati, Jonathan’s spokesman, said the president was only
being “metaphorical” and shouldn’t be understood literally. I countered this
disingenuous defense in a March 18, 2012 article titled, “Reuben
Abati’s Violence against Metaphors.” Among other things, I wrote: “[I]f a
metaphor by nature compares two dissimilar things, where is the metaphor in
Jonathan’s utterances? Sylvia was actually LITERALLY stoned by Bayelsans. So
nothing is being compared with anything here, whether implicitly or explicitly.
It is just a statement—and apparently an endorsement— of the bare fact of Sylva
being stoned by an angry, possibly ‘rented,’ crowd. And Jonathan’s saying that
he would ‘follow and stone’ Dickson should the occasion arise in future isn’t,
by the wildest stretch of literary fantasy, a metaphor, either; it’s a literal,
vulgar, unvarnished countenance of violence. It’s plain old verbal violence
that is outrivaled in rawness and impropriety only by Abati’s own violence
against metaphors and meaning.”

Governor el-Rufai’s media aides are inflicting the same
semantic violence on metaphors and the interpretive enterprise by claiming that
asking critics to jump from a hill isn’t synonymous with asking them to go die.
Well, if the media aides—or, better yet, el-Rufai himself— can go jump from Kufena
Hills and live to tell the story, we will believe their defense.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.